Category: A few great lines …

“Elsewhere greatness is recognized by acclamation. In canada, it comes by appointment.”
– Louis Dudek, in The Bumper Book, p. 55 (Noted Sept. 19, 1993)

“The arts are only viable and only justifiable if they serve values that are neither economic nor political. Their real contributions to society have nothing to do with paying taxes or creating jobs or providing propaganda for causes like national unity. They have their justification in irradiating our lives by the gifts of the imagination.
– George Woodcock in “Jackals' Dream” in The Bumper Book, p. 51 (Noted Sept. 19, 1993)

“The problem is to make space speak, to feed and furnish it, like mines laid in a rock which all of a sudden turns into geysers and bouqets of stone.” (p. 98)
“From the point of view of the mind, cruelty signifies rigour, implacable intention and decision, irreversible and absolute determination . . . There is no cruelty without consciousness.” (p. 101-102)
From Antonin Artaud The Theatre and Its Double, (noted Sept. 14, 1993)

“It must be borne in mind that most critics are men who have not had much luck and who, just about the time they were growing desperate, found a quiet little job as cemetery watchmen.” (p 324)
“Nothing is more respectable than long impunity.” (p. 336)
“Genius [is a] conflict between the Relative and the Absolute, between a finite presence and an infinite absence.” (p. 374)
-Take from Jean-Paul Sartre, Essays (noted Sept. 1, 1993)

“What is meant here by saying that existence precedes essence? It means that, first of all, man exists, turns up, appears on the scene and, only afterwards, defines himself. If man, as the existentialist conceives him, is indefinable, it is because at first, he is nothing. Only afterward will he be something and he himself will have made what he will be.” (p. 36)
“The existentialist … thinks it very distressing that God does not exist, because all possibility of finding values in a heaven of ideas disappears along with him: There can no longer be an a priori Good, since there is no infinite and perfect consciousness to think of it.” (p. 41)
“… that a man is nothing else than a series of undertakings, that he is the sum, the organization, the ensemble of the relationships which make up these undertakings.” (p. 49)
“What people would like is that a coward or a hero be born that way.” (p. 49)
“(Existentialism) can not be taken for a philosophy of quietism, since it defines man in terms of action; nor for a pessimistic description of man — there is no doctrine more optimistic, since man's destiny is within himself; nor for an attempt to discourage man from acting, since it tells him that the only hope is in his acting and that action is the only thing that enables a man to live. Consequently, we are dealing here with an ethics of action and involvement.” (p. 50)
– Jean Paul Sartre, “The Humanism of Existentialism”, in Essays

“… having silicon enforce rules means that we lose the fuzziness that enables the exceptions that are at the heart of fairness. . .”
– David Weinberger, “Why Creators Shouldn't Own What they Create” in The Journal of the Hyperlinked Organization, Oct. 15, 2003.

The ethical purpose of a liberal education is to liberate, which can only mean to make one capable of conceiving society as free, classless, and urbane. No such society exists, which is one reason why a liberal education must be deeply concerned with works of the imagination.
– Northrop Frye Anatomy of Criticism, p. 347 (Noted Dec. 10, 1990)
No society can plan for its own culture unless it restricts the output of culture to socially predictable standards.
– Frye, ibid., p. 347
Frye says Mill and Milton argue, in the Essay on Liberty and Aeropagitica respectively, that true intellectural liberty can only begin with an immediate and present guarantee on the autonomy of culture.
– Fry ibid., p. 348

Noel Annan reviews David Cannadine's The Decline and Fall of British Aristocracy and notes that in 1870, 7,500 families owned 4/5 of the land in the British Isles. (56% of England and 93% of Scotland).
“And yet, the classes have certainly changed their shape in Britain. The aristrocracy has diversified their range of jobs. Cannadine has identified a movie producer, an auctioneer, a professor of ceramics, a landscape gardener, a bookbinder, and a mining engineer. Some have slid down the social scale. They number a bus conductor, a police constable, an assistant in a deli, and the director of a chain of sex shops.”
– Noel Annan, “The Death of Society” in The New York Review of Books, Dec. 6, 1990. (Noted Dec. 9, 1990).
Interestingly, I just finished reading a review of Cannadine's latest book, Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire in the Nov. 7, 2002 issue of the New York Review. Ornamentalism — intentionally titled just so to draw a comparison to the late Edward Said's Orientalism — makes the case that the British ran that great empire not so much on a racist dynamic as a class dynamic.

Cannadine . . . deals with the race question without prejudice and without misconceptions. [He] concludes that racial considerations were not the predominant force in the ordering of the Empire. Too many people looked for affinities among the hierarchies of native societies. Too many were like Lady Gordon, welcoming the Fijian chiefs as men of equivalent rank while looking down on her nanny and the other whites of inferior class.
-David Gilmour, “Nobs and Nabobs” in the New York Review of Books, Nov. 7, 2002

The example of Mesoamerica shows once more that a civilization is not to be measured, or at least not exclusively, by its production techniques but by its thought, its art, and its achievements in the moral and political spheres.
– Octavio Paz, “The Power of Ancient Mexican Art”, in The New York Review of Books, Dec. 6, 1990. (Noted Dec. 8, 1990).

The greatest crimes are committed not for the sake of necessities, but for the sake of superfluities. Men do not become tyrants in order to avoid exposure in the cold.
– Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism +/- p. 208, noted Dec. 6, 1990